Telecom services are still evolving rapidly with today's fast changing business practices. Large corporations or companies such as banks, governments, power companies and even telecom companies have been slimmed down to the point that the telecom administrating people in such companies struggle to put out fires. The validating or optimization of phone plans is far down the list of priorities. Most IT departments of such corporations are focused on keeping the network up and running rather than eyeballing account irregularities. Telecom services are however notorious for changing without updating the inventory. In the era of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 in the USA and of its equivalent in Canada known as Bill 198, accuracy of the inventory of IT (Information Technology) and other assets of a company is highly important, especially from the financial viewpoint, but for many other reasons such as optimization of internal operations, equipment usage and human resources, in addition to billing charge verifications and audits.
Known in the art is U.S. Pat. No. 7,065,496 (Subbloie et al.), which discloses a process that calculates the variance between actual and targeted telecommunication performance metrics across multiple categories allowing a user to define variance tolerances and dictate appropriate responses including closed loop tracking resolution. The process is implemented through a system which manages service provider agreements in an agreements database accessible by a server. The agreements database stores contracted performance data. The system also has a user preferences database accessible by the server, a performance measurement module gathering actual performance data indicative of actual service performance, and a variance calculator determining agreement conformity status by determining whether the actual system performance indicated by the actual service performance data corresponds with the minimum service performance indicated by the contracted performance data within the maximum allowable deviance indicated by the user preference data.
The system does not use the inventory as the starting point for creating any service order. It appears that the user of such a system is required to write out a service order request and subsequently update the inventory manually, which proves the main reason why inventory tracking fails. Indeed, by having to word out a request in text format and subsequently update the inventory, the data becomes corrupted and inaccurate. Thus, a drawback of the system is that since the inventory needs to be manually updated by the user after the work is carried out, there are significant chances that data be miss-typed or worse forgotten altogether. Moreover, the time required to manually enter the information into the system is done at high costs, thus depleting the client company of her valuable resources.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,920,846 (Storch et al.) teaches a system and a method mainly directed to simplify the processing, management and tracking of service requests for installation, maintenance or repair works related to telecom services provided to customer premises. U.S. Pat. No. 6,868,397 (McCaslin) teaches a system and a method allowing equipment inventory to be tracked, monitored and evaluated, in particular for shipping or transportation purposes. U.S. Pat. No. 6,891,937 (Kuhn et al.) teaches a system designed to compile and manage telecom service data from different telecom service providers especially intended to users such as customers or operators. The system also provides reminder management for example for watching service and billing plan change deadlines. U.S. Pat. No. 6,937,993 (Gabbita et al.) teaches a workflow management system for tracking and processing telecom service orders, which centralizes order processing and tracking operations in a conventional type of telecom service system including multiple sub-systems performing specialized tasks. Providers for the service order receive work orders generated by the system in their e-mal in-box applications. U.S. Pat. No. 7,130,399 (Jean et al.) teaches a system for assembling a more accurate line record for a customer based on information acquired in real-time from dynamically-updated sources instead of static databases often containing outdated information. U.S. Pat. No. 7,167,550 (Klos et al.) teaches a system which is designed to reformat service orders coming from various telecom service companies into a standardized format for allowing their centralized processing. US 2004/0002886 (Dickerson et al.) teaches a system for processing service orders using a pair of databases, a first one which receives the orders and carries out a first processing step consisting in deleting possible duplicates and reformatting the orders in a user-friendly format, and a second one which stores the reformatted orders and provide them for subsequent order processing operations such as used by service managers and technicians. US 2004/0267586 (McDougal et al.) teaches a system for monitoring past due telecom service orders and classify them accordingly. US 2006/0075102 (Cupit) teaches yet another method and a system for processing telecom service orders, based on retrieving appropriate configuration profile data for implementing the requested service and producing service elements to be transmitted to the appropriate entities for executing the order. US 2006/0160546 (Tang et al.) teaches a system for processing service orders in a network management system (NMS). The system comprises a receiver for receiving the service orders, a processing component for processing the service orders and transmitting them to a data network for automatic service provisioning or to a workflow management system for manual service provisioning, provided that they comply with service type data registered in a database table. The system and the related method allow the registration of a new service order type in the database table without having to shutdown and restart the NMS.
US 2006/0215557 (Corley et al.), US 2007/0038532 (Vyas) and US 2007/0156476 (Koegler et al.) teach other systems and methods for processing service orders with respect to telecom or fleet management services, while U.S. Pat. No. 6,032,132 (Nelson), U.S. Pat. No. 6,535,593 (Cashiola), and U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,284 (Peters et al.) teach other telecom-related management systems.
However, the above systems and methods are all unsatisfactory for the purpose of providing a complete, versatile and flexible solution to the problem of real-time maintaining an inventory of services and associated resources of a client company, so that the inventory is accurate.